This is also worth a read:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-is-coming-to-pc/
Some choice quotes basically saying what I've been saying for the last few days in this discussion.
"we unveiled the
Xbox Velocity Architecture, a key part of how the Xbox Series X will deliver next generation gaming experiences"
Which links this article
https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/07/14/a-closer-look-at-xbox-velocity-architecture/
Quote "Xbox Series X includes the highest memory bandwidth of any next generation console with 16GB of GDDR6 memory, including 10GB of GPU optimized memory at 560 GB/s to keep the processor fed with no bottlenecks."
Back to the original article, quote: "Game workloads have also evolved. Modern games load in much more data than older ones and are smarter about how they load this data. These data loading optimizations are necessary for this larger amount of data to fit into shared memory/GPU accessible memory. Instead of loading large chunks at a time with very few IO requests, games now break assets like textures down into smaller pieces, only loading in the pieces that are needed for the current scene being rendered. This approach is much more memory efficient and can deliver better looking scenes, though it does generate many more IO requests."
The bottom line is that developers have been moving away from putting loads of crap in vRAM and hoping they need it eventually, to just streaming assets into vRAM for rendering just in time. And this allowed game words to be bigger than vRAM limitations by an order of magnitude and they want to continue to leverage this principle but with faster NVMe drives. You're not going to need 20Gb of vRAM, all you're doing is buying 10Gb of very expensive high speed GDDR6 memory for no reason.
